The Tiger Cub Speaks

Sophia Chua-Rubenfeld is a highly successful twenty-one-year-old. Still, she is fallible; and though she was expected, last Wednesday morning, at quarter past nine, she did not arrive at the Starbucks in Harvard Square until nine-nineteen. “I’m so sorry!” she said, removing her hat. “I don’t even have an excuse. I’m just slow.” She placed an order, with some difficulty (“This menu requires a body of knowledge that I do not possess”), and sat down. “I’m never late, normally. Well, that’s not fully true. Contrary to what you might think, my mom is not an entirely punctual person, so I might have gotten some bad training in that regard.”

The parental training that Chua-Rubenfeld got became the subject of a national debate when, in 2011, her mother, Amy Chua, published the memoir “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.” An excerpt in the Wall Street Journal provoked death threats; the book has sold more than a hundred and fifty thousand copies and inspired at least three book-length rebuttals.

Now Sophia’s parents—Chua and her husband, Jed Rubenfeld, who are both professors at Yale Law School—have co-authored “The Triple Package.” It is about the only topic more fraught than child rearing: why some minority groups in the U.S. “starkly outperform others.” “I think it’s well argued,” Chua-Rubenfeld said. Her younger sister “keeps reading aloud all these tweets saying, ‘The Tiger Mom is back, and she’s still racist!’ It sends my mom into paralyses of depression, actually. But my dad totally thrives on confrontation. He’s, like, ‘Overshadowed by my wife again! Why am I not being called a racist, too?’ ”

When “Tiger Mother” came out, Chua-Rubenfeld was unprepared for the spotlight. “People all over the Internet were saying terrible things about my family, and I’m pretending not to care, but I’m eighteen and insecure, and of course I care.” Her mother had portrayed her as a freakishly precocious piano prodigy. To counteract that impression, she started a blog called New Tiger in Town. On it, she described herself as an “aspiring Buddhist philosopher and/or warrior princess”; she posted a photo of herself wearing velvet tiger ears; and she wrote about accompanying her mother to red-carpet events (“Mark Wahlberg is such a boss”).

That fall, she enrolled at Harvard, where she is now a junior. “The students here, who are not the most well-adjusted people, were coming up to me, going, ‘I know the names of your dogs,’ ‘I know which piece you played at Carnegie Hall.’ ” In search of normalcy, she pledged a sorority, Kappa Alpha Theta, and joined R.O.T.C. (the drills were “pretty badass”). Now she hopes to be a military prosecutor, with a focus on sexual assault.

These days, her blog includes her studies (double major: philosophy and Sanskrit), and prose poems about heartache. “But, no matter what I write, there’s this cohort of Malaysian and Singaporean thirteen-year-olds who keep asking, ‘How do I study like a Tiger Cub?’ ” Chua-Rubenfeld said. In August of 2012, she posted a list of “reasons why I should not be your role model.” (No. 17: “I say cruel things when I’m angry.”)

Chua-Rubenfeld finished her cappuccino and walked across Harvard Yard to her philosophy class. She doodled—lips and eyes—but paid attention to the lecture, about Kant’s theory of ethics. Afterward, she met three friends, including Angie Peng, whom she introduced as “my sorority big sister.” Peng was born in Beijing and grew up in Ohio; Chua-Rubenfeld is, as her name suggests, Chinese-Jewish-American. According to her parents’ book, Jews and the Chinese are two American minorities that are enjoying “disproportionate success”—others include Mormons and Igbo Nigerians—because they exhibit three traits: insecurity, impulse control, and a superiority complex.

Chua-Rubenfeld summarized the argument: “You need to have this chip on your shoulder to get ahead, but you also need to have no doubt that you can do it.”

“Is the insecurity necessary?” Taryn Perry, another sorority sister, asked. Perry’s family is affiliated with the Daughters of the American Revolution. (From “The Triple Package”: “A culture of lassitude, of nonstriving, seems to have set in at the upper echelons of WASP society.”)

Selena Hurtado, who met Chua-Rubenfeld in R.O.T.C., was born in Texas; her parents are from Mexico. Chua-Rubenfeld said to Hurtado, “The good news for you, in the book, is that children of immigrants do really well.” The bad news is that Cuban-Americans—not Mexican-Americans—are the only Latinos on the Triple Package list.

“It’s awkward to talk about this stuff,” Hurtado said. “But it’s not like it’s a secret. My parents don’t know why Cubans do better, but they do notice it.”

“And, besides, it’s not like success is the only important thing,” Chua-Rubenfeld said. “The Nazis were a classic Triple Package culture.” She added, “And there are plenty of Triple Package people on antidepressants.” ♦